3 Workday Habits To Ditch If You Want To Be More Successful In 2017

Being a successful person is rarely about doing just one thing really well. Instead it’s about making a series of small decisions every single day that drive you towards success. Sometimes we are so used to doing certain things during our workday that we don’t even realise that these habits are holding us back from reaching our full potential.

In a recent article, Business Insider talked about common habits that could be holding you back from success and chances are you are guilty of at least one of these sneaky habits. Want to be more successful in 2017? It could be time to ditch these habits.

Tackling emails first

Personally, I am one of those people who can’t focus on anything else until I have emptied my email inbox. Having all of those little red flags just sitting there generally makes me feel uneasy and I know a whole lot of people who are in the same boat. According to Business Insider however, trying to empty your email inbox every morning could actually be getting in the way of your success.

Instead of trying to tackle every single email, try only answering urgent emails and then moving on to complete other urgent or important jobs before you return to sort out the remainder of the emails.

As Time-management expert and author Laura Vanderkam writes in her book, I Know How She Does It:”[Y]ou will never reach the bottom of your inbox. Better to realize that anything you haven’t gotten to after a week or so will have either gone away or been thrust back upon you by follow-up messages or calls. You can probably stop thinking about it. Earth will not crash into the sun.”

Not taking a lunch break

Let’s be real, we are all busy people. When the work piles up it’s often tempting to look at how we can buy ourselves more time in our days and more often than not, our lunch break is the first thing to go. However, studies have found that people who take breaks actually get just as much work done as those who do not and breaks are extremely restorative and actually boost your productivity, not to mention help you to feel better about life in general.

Tuning into music

They may be all the rage, but new research suggests that open plan offices may not be quite as good as they have been cracked up to be. With the rise of the open plan office and the increase of noise in the workplace, more and more people are tuning into their own personal music devices in an attempt to drown out distracting noise.

However as Business Insider points out, you may feel like music is increasing your productivity but new research is suggesting that performance suffers significantly when a person is listening to music while performing intellectual tasks.

“The exception is when you’re performing tasks that are repetitive or monotonous, such as when you’re working on an assembly line or driving for long periods of time,” Business Insider reports. “In that case, listening to music can perk you up.”